In the end it's a matter of preferences and goals. In my ideal world there would be a language similar[1] to Common Lisp but with the widespread acceptance that would make it so you could suggest using it in most business applications without receiving either blank stares or derisive laughter.
In other words, (if I hadn't already retired) I'd like to be able to get a job using a language that doesn't completely suck.
Long story short, I think what I want is something a little less optimized for exploratory programming for one hacker and more for larger teams who just want to sell me ads or push me some angry-making content. (haha, that last bit is a joke but you know what I mean.)
Dylan was an attempt at that but had unlucky timing.
I can totally understand why people who are already fortunate enough to be able to spend their time optimizing SBCL or just hacking their fun libraries in CL by themselves wouldn't want to make that other language I'm looking for. What's in it for them? They'd end up with something they consider less fun than CL. It would probably have to be pushed by some language enthusiast within some megacorp.
(What if Rob Pike had happened to like Lispy languages? We might've had something a lot better than Go. 
)
How does this relate to your original post? Having a way forward and seeing change in the language is motivating for a lot of people like me and maybe it could lead to higher up-take for CL. One can hope, at least.
Personally, I find the difficulty of making anything better in CL (for so many reasons, not just the ANSI spec) demotivating so I've chosen to work on something even more obscure and pointless in my spare time. It beats doing puzzles. \o/
[1] I don't care whether it's s-expression syntax or not but I do care about multi-methods, a decent object system, macros, and generally having One Way to Do Things.